The Middle of Everywhere (3 page)

Our city's experience is not unique. As writer Pico Iyer puts it, "More bodies are being thrown more widely across the planet than ever before." America keeps taking people in. By 2050, whites of European origin will no longer be the majority race in our country. We're becoming a richer curry of peoples. Before 1990 most of our refugees settled in six big states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois. But during the 1990s refugees moved into the Midwest, including Nebraska. And what they found was a vast farm and ranch state defined by its most beautiful river.

Nebraska
is from an Oto word, meaning "flat water," or the river we now call the Platte. That glorious brown river has been an east-west thoroughfare for thousands of years. It has provided a resting place for cranes and geese as they travel along the great American flyway.

Willa Cather wrote of our vast prairies where tall grasses undulated in a way that reminded her of a great red sea. However, especially in eastern Nebraska, there is almost no natural landscape left—only a few scraps of prairie, an occasional prairie dog town or burr oak forest. Instead, we have fields of wheat, corn, soybeans, and sorghum, little towns, and, increasingly, suburban sprawl.

Our state's best feature is our low population density. If they have to drive around the block for a spot to park, the locals complain about parking problems downtown. The difference between rush and nonrush hour commutes is, at worst, ten minutes. Three-fourths of Nebraska residents live in Omaha and Lincoln. Our third-largest city has around forty thousand people. In the rest of the state there is "a lot of dirt between the lightbulbs." The little towns are, to quote Greg Brown, "scattered like fireflies across the dark night." Some towns are so quiet that your own footsteps echo as you walk the empty streets. There are many places where you can hear the breeze in the cottonwoods or the sound of a killdeer. An international astronomical organization meets in western Nebraska because it has less light pollution than almost anywhere on earth.

We have ten-foot-tall sunflowers, accessible quiet places, and gentle people. Long-term Nebraskan residents tend to be large, rather plain white people whom my husband swears he can recognize in any airport in America. Nebraskans are the kind of people who compete to ride in the backseat, who put money in Salvation Army buckets, and who bake casseroles for grieving neighbors. We are humble people, proud of our football team, our Sandhills, our Native American heritage, and our few celebrities—Warren Buffett, Henry Fonda, Johnny Carson, and Tom Osborne. We don't expect to be invited any place glamorous and we don't make demands. We are happy just to be included.

Most of us come from farm families whose grandparents barely survived the Great Depression. We like our state, but worry that we won't be able to keep our children here. Wal-Marts and Pizza Huts are moving in. Family farms and city cafes are dying.

Lincoln is our capital city. Its skyline is dominated by our capitol building with its golden dome crowned by
The Sower
scattering seed across the land. The year I wrote this book, the capitol was being repaired and refurbished for the new century, a nice metaphor for the changes in our state. The men who worked on the capitol scaffolding spoke thirty different languages, which prompted my friend Sarah to call our capitol "the tower of Babel."

Loren Eiseley, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Kent Haruf all lived in Lincoln, and many fine writers live here now. Historically we've been a white-collar town with three universities and many insurance companies and banks. In our town of 210,000 people, we have 170 churches, a symphony, a performing arts center, and a university film theater. Two tall-grass prairies and a wilderness park border Lincoln and make it possible for anyone to be "in the country" in fifteen minutes. In the last decade, we have had years in which no one was murdered.

At the same time we are becoming a much more diverse community, we are also becoming more like everywhere else. Lincolnites eat at the same chain restaurants and shop at the same corporate stores as everyone else. We have the same glitzy malls, movies, and music that people do in London, Manila, and Moscow. By now, the world is connected by American Express cards, media, computers, and airline companies. People can buy Kentucky Fried Chicken in Chiang Mai and Dallas Cowboy memorabilia in Burmese markets. The Marlboro man rides in Warsaw and, no matter where people travel, they can sleep in a Sheraton or Hilton. People in Siberia eat pizza and play golf, and people in Lincoln play bridge over the Internet with people from Taiwan.

Our city library now has books in Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Urdu. Our colleges educate people from all over the world. Our citizens travel to the Galápagos or search for the wild ponies of Manchuria. But nowhere can they escape corporate logos. The local is no longer protected. The unique is vanishing. In
The Lexus and the Olive Tree,
Thomas Friedman quoted a man as saying, "There are two ways to make a person homeless—destroy his home or make his home look like everyone else's."

These trends can be called many names but, for shorthand, I will call them globalization. Many writers have explored this phenomenon, but they have ignored the questions that most interest me. How do these processes change us humans? How do they affect our choices, our relations with one another, our allegiances, our mental and social health, our sense of place, and—at core—our identities?

Researching this book has been my grown-up version of the globe game. I wanted to understand what the deal is everywhere. Studying newcomers to Lincoln, I have learned more than a traveler. I have asked questions about family life, cultural collisions, dreams, and value systems. I have had long-term relationships with people who grew up in the mountains of Laos, in war-torn Bosnia, in a village in Jalisco, or on the steppes of Russia. I have talked to a Nuer tribesman about the refugee camps in Kenya and to a Muslim schoolteacher about the war in Sierra Leone. I have heard stories about small villages in Hungary and listened to Afghani women discuss the effects of the Taliban on their lives.

I have celebrated Eid al-Adha with northern Sudanese, the Holi festival with my friends from India, and attended a Latina girl's quinceañera. I have done family therapy with refugees from Macedonia or Romania, gone to a Southeast Asian Buddhist Parents Day festival, and still slept in my own bed at night.

Bill Holm, a writer from Minnesota, taught for a year in China. Afterward he wrote a book entitled
Coming Home Crazy.
In its preface he said that while he didn't necessarily know that much about China, his year there had taught him a tremendous amount about America. I feel that way about my experiences with refugees. They've helped me see my country with fresh clear eyes.

Tillie Olsen said there are five colleges: the college of motherhood, of human struggle, of everyday work, of literature, and of contrast. Refugees have taught me about contrasts. How do I see the world versus how do they see the world? What are my assumptions? What are theirs? What is particular in the human experience and what is universal?

The borderland where cultures collide is the best vantage point for observing human resilience. Where cultures intersect, all of a sudden everyone must do things differently. I love to be present when teenagers who don't know the earth is round or who have never seen a toothbrush collide with teens who play violins or scuba dive in the Bahamas. I like to watch people who have no written language in their home country learn to use the World Wide Web or to see what happens when third-generation Swedish farmers hire day laborers who have lived for generations on the island of Haiti or in the mountains of Peru.

Like all people, I see the world through my own cultural lenses. My view of reality is dependent on my Nebraska perspective. As I write this, I am a wife, mother, and a grandmother. I was raised Methodist although now I am a Unitarian. I am middle-class, middle-aged, and very ordinary in most ways. I have lived in the Midwest almost all my life.

Like most Americans I speak only English fluently. I value freedom and personal space. I am time conscious. I am comfortable with only certain forms of touch. A certain amount of eye contact and distance between bodies seems right to me. Some things seem much more edible than others. Certain clothes—jeans and T-shirts—feel best to me. I do not cover my head when I go out and I wear shoes inside my house. I like to talk.

In many ways I look, think, and act like a Nebraskan. But it is more complex than that. Nebraska culture is not coherent and homogenous. We have many Native American tribes with powwows all through the year and we have strong African American communities in Lincoln and Omaha. We have liberals and conservatives, sophisticates and provincials who have never left their county of birth. We have evangelicals and Sufis, hate groups and Nebraskans for Peace. Within Nebraska culture there are the cultures of academics, businesspeople, farmers, and artists. There are cultures of folk musicians, pheasant hunters, cyclists, and vegetarians. (Although in Nebraska, the beef state, vegetarians are pretty low-key.)

I have more in common with my editor in New York and with psychologists in Europe than I have with some Nebraskans. And I belong to other cultures—the culture of women, of gardeners, of my neighborhood, of writers, of Piphers, and of my family of origin. After I lost my parents, I was for a while in what Renato Rosaldo calls "the invisible culture of the bereaved," a culture all of us belong to if we live long enough.

Each of these cultures is different from the others. I move among them, switching roles and rules as I move. My everyday life is crisscrossed by borders. It is at those borders between cultures that much of my most interesting experience occurs.

Garrison Keillor wrote that, "If we knew the stories of refugees, they would break our hearts." As I've worked on this book, I've heard stories of mythic scope—of grandparents carrying children across raging rivers, of families barefoot in the snow, trudging across mountain passes, and of a poet surviving torture in an Iraqi prison by remembering the beauty of a flower garden. I've met Vietnamese men who, while they were in reeducation camps, were sent on their hands and knees into fields to find land mines. I've met members of the Polish Solidarity movement, former slaves, and women abducted and raped by soldiers. I've heard children tell of bombs that they thought were fireworks until they saw bodies explode. I have seen the full scope of what human beings do to each other and for each other.

I've interviewed high school students in ELL classes and worked with an elementary school classroom where the kids spoke twenty-two different languages. I've consulted at summer camps for refugee kids and attended English classes for parents of students in the public schools. I've trained members of different cultural groups to be liaisons between the mental health community and their ethnic community, consulted with our community action program's staff, and been a member of the New Americans Task Force.

As both a therapist and interviewer, I came to the conclusion that a formal question-and-answer format is not the best way to learn about newcomers. Partly, that format is too similar to an interrogation. People are fearful they will say the wrong thing. Mainly, I noticed that all the really interesting experiences came before and after those formal sessions. A grandmother would offer me some fresh naan and a bottle of Pepsi. Then she would ask me if Americans ate blackbirds and cardinals. A woman would whisper as I left, "Can you help me get my son out of jail in Saudi Arabia?" A man would ask, "Do you know where I can get a used car for sixty dollars?" A dignified widower would shyly ask if I could help him find a wife. A teenager would show her father the Walkman she bought with wages from her after-school job. The father would shout, "In the Ukraine, my brother has no food and you bought a toy?"

I have lived, as much as a white person born in the Midwest can, in the world of refugees. I've tried to be what Rosaldo calls a "connected critic," not judgmental but involved and observant. I have tried to write about others with the respect that I would want for myself. In the face of so much tragedy, humility has been the only possible emotional stance. I didn't want to turn anyone's life into an anecdote. The only justification for writing these stories is to help others. As I've worked to understand the world of refugees, I've been aware that they were working to understand mine. We observed, analyzed, and changed each other.

The first time I met a family of Sudanese from the Kakuma Refugee Camp, I had to deal with my fear of the other. I was alone in a room with Nuer and Dinka men, tall blue-black Africans who spoke very little English. Some had
gaar,
facial scarring done in manhood ceremonies. I was anxious, mostly about making a fool of myself, but also that these men might somehow hurt me. I had to admit I harbored the rudiments of racism, an unconscious attitude that I fight daily, but that none of us can totally escape. As I sat with them, I marveled that I was even in a room with people from southern Sudan, tribal people I had read about in college in the 1960s. One of the Nuer men asked me, "Are you an anthropologist?"

I laughed and said, "No, not really." That broke the ice. I realized, that strange as these men looked to me, I seemed equally weird to them. They must have been looking at me, a plain-faced, curly-haired, middle-aged woman in blue jeans, and thinking, "What is she doing here?" Or even, "Is she animal, vegetable, or mineral?"

My immersion in the world of refugees has not been anxiety- or mistake-free. At first, like many people who have lived mostly in a world of their own kind, I was clumsy with people who didn't look and talk like me. I worried I wouldn't be able to understand people for whom English was a second, third, or fifth language. I wondered if I would be accepted and understood. I was embarrassed that I was fluent only in English.

I had trouble mastering names of people from foreign cultures. I knew too many men named Ali or Mohammed and especially on the phone I had trouble keeping them straight. I wasn't quite sure how to talk or touch, what behavior was appropriate in what settings, and when I might inadvertently offend. Encounters with people very different from me were hard work. Often I was anxious, awkward, and even suspicious. What were they saying about me?